After a comfortable win against a Florida State team that has struggled so far this year, the North Carolina Tar Heels will get a stiffer test in their second conference game as they visit Andy Enfield and the SMU Mustangs, who are off to an 11-2 start. It will be UNC’s first road game in the ACC and second of the season after their win at Rupp Arena, while the Mustangs are opening their own ACC slate on Saturday.
The story of SMU basketball so far this season has been that of senior guard Boopie Miller. Miller was good last year, averaging 13.2 points and 5.5 assists per game en route to an All-ACC Third Team selection, but he’s been a star this year. He’s averaging 19.9 points, 7.1 assists, and 2.2 steals per game with shooting splits of 47/42/92, ranking at or near the top of the ACC in all those categories. He rarely comes off the floor for the Mustangs and his impact for them might be even bigger than the stats. There are a lot of several-minute stretches where he assists or scores on every field goal his team makes, and he’s lethal both creating offense and playing off the ball — and he draws a lot of fouls, too.
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That said, his backcourt mate B.J. Edwards is having a very good season of his own, averaging 13.5 points, 5.5 assists, and 2.6 steals per game. He’s not the sniper that Miller has been, shooting just 31% from 3 and 74% from the free-throw line, but he loves getting into the paint and is a strong and creative finisher around the rim. SMU’s third starter on the perimeter is Jaron Pierre, who actually leads his team in field goal attempts. He’s another strong rim finisher and great off-ball mover who’s not fantastically efficient if he’s forced to take shots away from the basket and isn’t very good at giving up the ball when he’s in trouble. He’s good enough at what he does that he doesn’t turn it over a lot either, and he scores 18 points a game. All three guards are pests on defense, presenting challenges for a UNC team that doesn’t have a go-to ballhandler, but that aggressiveness leads to them giving up a fair number of easy buckets and/or free throws — the three combine to average nearly 7 fouls a game.
For a lot of college teams, that 51 points per game would be a sizeable majority of their offense. SMU, however, has the 16th-highest scoring average in the country at better than 91 points a game, so they get a lot of points from players elsewhere. Their frontcourt starters, Corey Washington and Samet Yigitoglu, both average around 12 points per game. Washington is an undersized stretch forward who’s a good shooter and finds himself in the right spots in the paint for offensive rebounds and putbacks, while the 7’2 Yigitoglu provides the team’s only real presence on the interior. He’ll be a challenge for Henri Veesaar on both ends with his strength and length, though he’s not very mobile. And Enfield gets a solid amount of bench production to boot, going 9-10 deep in most games and getting around 20 bench points a contest.
In a few ways, this game will be a clash of styles. SMU is a guard-forward team that leans on its offense and hopes its defense can do enough to let them outscore their opponents, while UNC, of course, has the best frontcourt in the country and has been a defensive force that’s good enough offensively. But on the other hand, SMU doesn’t necessarily play like you’d expect a guard-heavy team to — they’re only slightly above average in tempo and take and make a middling amount of threes, relying more on guards getting into the paint. That does play a little into UNC’s hands on defense, where they’re elite protecting the rim. On the other hand, SMU has been an elite 3-point defensive team, and this has been a UNC team that takes a ton of outside shots even when they’re not falling, so it could easily be a game where UNC falls into a scoring drought that’s too much to overcome against as high-octane an offense as this one. It’ll be interesting to see if the Heels can maintain their streak of games where they hold opponents without a point for at least one 4-5 minute stretch.
In SMU’s two losses, to LSU and Vanderbilt, they were unable to generate a ton of turnovers and especially live-ball turnovers, and that gave them the ability to get shots off. SMU doesn’t do a great job of contesting shots inside the three-point arc, so if you can find your spots, there are points to be had. And if you get this SMU team behind early, it’s possible to force them into thinking they need three-pointers to come back, which doesn’t do them any favors. One thing worth looking out for is that SMU tends to play a lot of high-foul games — they average 17 fouls a game on their end, which is a little above average, and get fouled about 20 times a game, which is near tops in the nation. So — can UNC handle that physicality on both ends, and can they make free throws despite being a below-average free throw shooting team so far this season? It might well be one of the determinants of an early big-time game in the ACC.
